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What’s in a name? The wit and whimsy of a national lab’s conference rooms

Fermilab’s One East conference room. Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

This summer, The New York Times’ Opinionator blog posted a photo of an ordinary, fluorescent-lit hallway, indistinct apart from one feature: a placard proclaiming “Dungeon” in tall capital letters. As part of the blog’s “summer game” series, readers were asked to guess the context of the photo. Many correctly guessed “conference room,” but none deduced the precise location: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a Department of Energy-funded high-energy physics lab in the suburbs of Chicago.

As it turns out, Fermilab plays host to a trove of whimsical, bizarrely named conference rooms.

Wilson Hall’s 16 floors provide folks with many meeting spaces, to which many are given whimsical names. Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

While the Dungeon is found in the lab’s Cross Gallery, a building dedicated to accelerator operations, most of the conference rooms are housed in the lab’s main office building, Wilson Hall. John Kent, the building manager for Wilson Hall, said that rooms are often named by those who would most often use them. The building, modeled after a Gothic cathedral in Beauvais, France, has one of the world’s largest atriums, and, at 16 stories, it towers over the rest of the lab grounds. Much of the work conducted there translates into high-tech particle accelerator experiments and contributions to scientific discoveries such as the Higgs field.

One of Wilson Hall’s conference rooms is named the Hornet’s Nest. This is not it. Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

Let’s explore, from the ground up.

1. Names of meeting rooms start out simple and ordinary on the first floor: One North, One East, One West and The Small Dining Room.

2. The second floor, though, is where things start to get weird. For starters, both the Black Hole and the Snake Pit flank the north end of the building. Then, the Comitium is just a short jog away, its name stemming from the Latin word for “assembly.” Fermilab’s first director and Wilson Hall’s namesake, Robert Wilson, chose that one personally as a hat tip to the so-named outdoor public meeting spaces of ancient Rome — Wilson had spent some time studying art in Italy prior to his directorship days.

Wilson also named Curia II, another second-floor conference room (preceded by the Curia in the Fermilab Village), this time after a Latin word thought to derive from the word “coviria,” meaning a “gathering of men.” No word on how Fermilab’s female employees feel about this.

You can see the sun rise from the Sunrise conference room. Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

As one climbs higher in the Brutalist concrete tower that is Wilson Hall (there’s a reason it’s also called the high-rise), the conference rooms get fewer and farther between.

3. The third floor only has two of them, and while they sometimes go by “Theory Conference Rooms 3-Northeast and 3-Northwest,” the names Conjectiorium and Theory lend more individuality.

4. The fourth floor, though equally scant in its conference room offerings, has a bit more flair. The Req Room’s name conjures up visions of Hogwarts’ Room of Requirement, while the Abacus was christened in an employee naming-contest.

5. The ConFESSional, on the fifth floor, plays with the acronym for Fermilab’s Facilities Engineering Services Section and, together with the Baptismal and Tabernacle, creates some kind of holy trinity of religion-themed conference room names.

6 and 7. Up a floor, the Dark Side channels George Lucas. Then, on seven, there’s the Racetrack (perhaps paying homage to the particles that some accelerators hurtle around a circular tunnel at high speeds). Other sports-themed conference rooms include the Bullpen, also on the seventh floor, the 19th Hole, on 14, and elsewhere on the Fermilab grounds, the Outfield, in MW-9 near the Meson Assembly Building.

You can also watch the sun set from the Sunset conference room. Here, it sets over Mobius Strip, a sculpture outside Wilson Hall. Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

8. Wilson Hall’s eighth floor’s claim to fame is the Hornet’s Nest, marked by an actual hornet’s nest on display. A plaque by the nest jokingly says “a piece of the DZero Muon Chamber.” The detector from the DZero experiment was one of two that were positioned along the now shut-down Tevatron accelerator ring; muon chambers made up the outermost layer of DZero’s detector. Colorful signs posted on either side of the conference room state the words or phrases for “hornet’s nest” in many languages: “zes muv,” “avispero,” “nido del calabrone,” “Hornissennest.”

In its day, the buildings housing the DZero experiment had a few quirky room titles of their own, among them: Hurricane Deck, Doghouse, Salles Des Heros (“room of heroes” in French) and the Far Side. The latter might be a nod to the popular cartoonist Gary Larson, who often draws tongue-in-cheek portrayals of scientists in his comics. Too bad for DZero, though; Larson already has a species of lice named after him — Strigiphilus garylarsoni — and is unlikely to be wooed by a conference room namesake.

9. It seems most likely that Wilson Hall ninth floor’s Libra is yet another reference to a Latin term rather than a zeal for the astrological. But you never know.

11. Users may watch the sun rise from the Sunrise conference room, located on the northeast corner of the 11th floor, or enjoy a view of the setting sun from the southwest corner of 11, in the Sunset conference room.

12. The 12th floor houses the Nu’s Room, which has nothing to do with the HBO drama series and everything to do with the Greek letter v. In particle physics, v, or nu, represents subatomic particles called neutrinos.

15. The highest conference room in Wilson Hall is the Aquarium. One can only imagine how often mix-ups occur with the Quarium, a room located on floor 8.

About 2,500 researchers from 34 countries collaborate on Fermilab experiments, some of them full-time employees and more of them visiting experimenters from other institutions. If one thing is clear from this list, it’s that researchers from all different backgrounds can be brought together by puns, inside jokes, dead languages, offbeat pop culture references and passed-down traditions.

One East is often called “The Rabi Room” because it’s sumptuous paneling led some of us to recall I.I. Rabi’s quote “Who ordered that?”

Matt

This is very timely! I have a meeting this afternoon in “Sunrise” and despite 21 years at the lab, I had no idea where it is until now.

Bob Peterson

……….and the Aerie (WH15NW) has been visited by Red Tail Hawks, Peregrine Falcons, and Turkey vultures soaring just outside the window not to mention a good post to watch the CGeese and Great Blue Herons.

John

Wilson Hall … High Rise … but in the very early days when many labored in the muddy beam lines, it was called the Palace.

David Christian

Libra (WH9SE) IS named after the constellation and astrological sign (the scales). The conference room is home to the Seiko balance beam that Drasko Jovanovic brought with him from Argonne. The scales lived on the 10th floor cross-over for many years while the Physics Section office (later PPD/Physics Department office) was located there. During most of that time, Hans Jostlein kept the scales in good working order.

Jack

I believe the Racetrack on 7 was named for the unique, large oval table in that meeting room. But, after a renovation, I don’t think that table exists any longer….

John

D-Zero was also home to The Ninth Circle, which was particularly apt for graduate students presenting what they hope to become their thesis.